15 November 2003

It is Saturday and I have lived through another week. The sun is rising optimistic, the red glow spreading under layer of rolling cumulus clouds. The contours are limned in crimson like the quilting of an inverted mattress. While we collectively made it through the week not everyone did. I clicked on the radio to let the world in while I made the coffee.

Of all things, the Nurses strike at the hospital down the block from my parent's house made the news. It is in its second year and it drew some Teamster Organizers to town. An odd bunch, the Teamsters, both conservative and radical. Their involvement in Ward Two of our little town ousted my Dad from the Council Seat he has held for a decade and installed some Jacobin fire-breather who wants to overthrow City Hall.

Poor Dad. His ancien regime is over, but at least no one is storming the Bastille in Petoskey, Michigan. Not yet, anyway. He got caught in a tide of history, and what is worse, the Teamsters picket on the main road through town and the truckers all honk their horns when they see them. It is very annoying.

According to National Public Radio, no one remembers what the strike is about. Everyone seems to claim it is about doing the right thing, the nurses advocating "better care," and the hospital management claiming "cost containment."

It is unusual to actually know what the issue is, since the News just does the soundbite and moves on. It is about money, like, duh.

During contract negotiations, the Nurses argued for an increase to the hourly wage and management went along with it, to a degree. The nurses worked a rotating schedule which amounted to 36 hours, rather than the traditional 40. Everyone agreed that being paid for 40 was fair, but the Nurses argued that the four hours they didn't work should count to retirement. Work it out, over decades and you will see why both sides cared about it. They could not agree, management locked them out, hired new people and life went on. The nursing shortage being what it is, everyone has a job. But the great struggle continues, and the Teamsters saw a pony to ride and they did. They brought money and organizers to the little town by the Bay. To this day there are signs supporting the nuruses on lawns all over Emmett County.

Black and White, left and right. No possibility of agreement.

Like Istanbul this Sabbath morning in the holy month of Ramadan. Suicide car bombers attacked two synagogues in downtown Istanbul this morning. They killed 23 people, or at least that is the count for now. They hit the largest synagogue in town, a legacy of the times that the Sultan made the Eastern Empire a haven for the Jews battered by the Diaspora. The targets were in the old Jewish Quarter he established long ago. The Neve Shalom synagogue was hit simultaneously with the Beth Israel Synagogue three miles away in the Sisli district. The scumbags who pulled this mass-murder-masquerading-as-political theater call themselves the "Great Eastern Islamic Raiders' Front." At least that is the name they are using today.

There might be 80 wounded, the Government is admitting to that, which suggests that the death count will rise.

It is not the first time targets associated with Judaism have be struck here, nor is it even the first time the Neve Shalom synagogue has been bombed. Fanatics-or -fanatics-unknown bombed it in 1986, killing twenty-two, and the scumbag Hezbollah tried ten years later but failed to kill anyone, innocent or not.

There was a time, not so long ago, that bombing was a way of life in Turkey. Then, the bombers tended to be left-wing secularists. Now they are right-wing fundamentalists, though I am increasingly feeling that the terms of reference mean nothing. The reference point, the political topology, comes from Paris of the 1790s, via the Tennis Court where the Sun King played and a stable where the Nobles kept their horses. A time when the French Revolutionaries were trying to figure out their New Order.

Louis XVI's had a natural desire to hold onto his grandfather's legacy of absolutism. Representatives of the Third Estate, the one that followed the Nobility and the Church, wanted to talk through Prime Minister Necker's tepid proposals for reform. What the Third Estate wanted was provision for a sort of one-man, one-vote formula which would have weakened the Estate system. Previously, the First Estate of the Clergy would ally itself with the Second Estate of the Nobles, effectively neutering the influence of the non-cleric and land-owning majority. The Third Estate was eager to debate, and a meeting was called at the Salle des Menus Plaisirs, near the palace at Versailles. When the delegates arrived they found the Authorities had it locked up tight as a drum. The Deputies refused to back down and moved the session to a nearby Royal facility of sport.

The hot-heads argued that the Third Estate should make some sort of declaration, and retire to Paris where the mass of the people might protect them from retribution by the Royal army. That would clearly be an act of rebellion, reasoned the moderates, and thus proposed that an oath of allegiance to the Nation be drafted which stipulated that power resided exclusively in the People, and that this assembly of the Third Estate would not disband until a constitution had been written. 577 Delegates signed the document which later came to be known as The Tennis Court Oath, which is not at all the same thing as what I say when I double-fault.

Louis XVI blinked, and called for a combined meeting of all the Estates, what was called the Estates General, for the purpose of writing a constitutional charter. There were no political parties as we know them then. There were interests of class between the Clerics and the Nobles, allying against change propsoed by the Commoners. There were the intellectuals or ever-evolving sensibility. The Girondins were so named because the most prominent of them came from the region around Bordeaux, the Gironde. They dominated the Jacobin club which in turn took its name from the Dominican or"Jacobin" convent where it met. It was a fountain of ideas and was was dominated by Robespierre, who ultimately was the architect of the Terror that dragged them all be Madam Guillotine. But in the happier and intoxicating days of the National Assembly, the Girondins formed the core of the transition ministries from the Absolutism of the King to the rule of the National Assembly. They were a bastion of radical moderation and as unable to ride the tiger of rebellion as Aleksandr Feodorovich Kerensky was more than a century later. In the Moscow winter of 1917, Lenin was able to exploit the sense that the Revolution had not gone far enough, that only a little more change was necessary for the perfection of society.

So it was with Robespierre. He denounced what he saw as the failed policies of the Girondins and another loose alliance formed around him. This proximity was as much physical as intellectual. Things were more human scale in the Paris of that time, particularly when cast against the mile long façade of Versailles. There were few halls outside the hands of the nobility with sufficient space for public meetings.

Which connects directly to this day and this time.

Our image of the political landscape is tied directly the manege, or riding-school, where the French National Assembly met for reasons of space until 1793. The benches in front of the President, six deep, were known as the Plain and were occupied by moderate Deputies. Benches on his left were ranked more steeply in rising rows of nine seats each. The Jacobins took these seats, whose towering immediacy resembled a mountain. From September 1792 the "Mountain" included all the Paris deputies who acknowledged Robespierre as its leader. By extension, the term "montagnard" came to mean anyone sharing radical views, and not our former allies from the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

Robespierre begat the Terror, which begat Napoleon, which spurred he rise of Prussia which begat the Kaiser, whose paranoia and withered arm gaveus the First War that does not quite seem over yet. Which is quite bedise the point.

When I was growing up I did not know that I was supposed to view the "left" and "right" from the perspective of the President where he stood on the rostrum. Perhaps it is a memory of some other life, packed into a space to small for the purpose, sweating, emotion mounting as a Robespierre sweeps me along with his rhetoric and passion, Or perhaps is the simple fact that any meeting or church service I went to was organized, in my mind, from the perspective of someone seated in the back of the room. Accordingly, I have the mental image of where conservative and radical exist on the spectrum. Conservatives would be to my left, and the radicals to my right.

It seems like a useful perspective, these days.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra